FTI / Relativity 2026 General Counsel Report: 87% AI Adoption — But Only 23% Use It Daily

FTI Consulting and Relativity's seventh annual General Counsel Report (March 2026) found that in-house generative AI usage reached 87% in 2026, up from 44% in 2025 and 20% in 2023. The counter-number is Bloomberg Law's 2026 State of Practice survey: only 23% of in-house lawyers use AI tools daily, and 27% had not used them in the prior six months. Of those using AI at least a few times a month, one-third report it saves them under 30 minutes a day, and 22% report 30 minutes to an hour. The dominant use cases remain research (87%), contract clause identification (63%), audio and video transcription (53%), and first-pass review (37%). The gap between adoption breadth and actual daily use is the most important data point for law firm BD teams: in-house teams are not yet at the operational scale where AI has materially changed how they deploy outside counsel. When they get there — when AI is reducing the in-house demand for outside counsel research and first-pass review at scale — the outside counsel work that survives will be the complex, high-judgment, relationship-dependent work that the Litera and Law.com pieces describe. Firms that are not deepening those relationship channels now will face that market shift without a defence.